While reading EBB poetry while looking for post-colonial settings, one feels more of a place of unsettlement and torment than an idea of a finalized established place. Interestingly enough, her poems sound more like poems of exile more than poems of colonialism. In Case Guido Windows, 1851, we see a neighborhood full of life and song. Dare I say CORINNE? Oh, some kind of destiny that is not meant to be fulfilled is connected to Italy, especially the section on Florence.
“O trusted broken prophecy,
O richest fortune sourly crost,
Born for the future, to the future lost!”
Destiny and nation seem to be connected to culture present and past…the future is very uncertain though… The resilience and the patience of the history waiting is: “three hundred years his patient statues wait/in a small chapel of the dim St. Lawrence.”
The human virtues, like patience, given to statues we know that history is written in the bones of the land.
“For me who stand in Italy to0day
Where worthier poets stood and sang before,
I kiss their footsteps, yet their words gainbsay.
I can but muse in hope upon this shore.”
Yes, Corrine again, this time as the muse of the land inspiring other poets to compose and to write about Italy, I wonder if EBB is referring to the fictional woman or to the history of women poets like Corrine, in any case, she is inspired to write while she is there. Again, we see the mystical elevation of time and song, form ashes elevated to sky:
Alas, this Italy has too long swept
Heroic ashes up for hour class stand;
Of he own past, impassioned sympholept!
We do not serve the dead-the past is past!
These wonderful lines dengue in mysticism of spirits asking to be fed by new creations is a metaphor of and in between place and space. In between governments and place, between poetics and politics belonging to the land of inspiration.
“O trusted broken prophecy,
O richest fortune sourly crost,
Born for the future, to the future lost!”
Destiny and nation seem to be connected to culture present and past…the future is very uncertain though… The resilience and the patience of the history waiting is: “three hundred years his patient statues wait/in a small chapel of the dim St. Lawrence.”
The human virtues, like patience, given to statues we know that history is written in the bones of the land.
“For me who stand in Italy to0day
Where worthier poets stood and sang before,
I kiss their footsteps, yet their words gainbsay.
I can but muse in hope upon this shore.”
Yes, Corrine again, this time as the muse of the land inspiring other poets to compose and to write about Italy, I wonder if EBB is referring to the fictional woman or to the history of women poets like Corrine, in any case, she is inspired to write while she is there. Again, we see the mystical elevation of time and song, form ashes elevated to sky:
Alas, this Italy has too long swept
Heroic ashes up for hour class stand;
Of he own past, impassioned sympholept!
We do not serve the dead-the past is past!
These wonderful lines dengue in mysticism of spirits asking to be fed by new creations is a metaphor of and in between place and space. In between governments and place, between poetics and politics belonging to the land of inspiration.